Amazon Launches Spot Instances for EC2

Amazon Web Services has announced Spot Instances, a new option for
purchasing and consuming Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute resources.
With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run
those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price, Amazon
officials said. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and
demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot
Instances.

Amazon said Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and
Reserved Instances, providing another way to obtain Amazon EC2 compute
capacity. To get started using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit
http://aws.amazon.com.

"As customers continued to expand their use of AWS, they started asking
if additional pools of capacity were available, even if only for a few hours at
a time," said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2, in a statement.
"Some customers were looking to reduce costs in exchange for being flexible as
to when they run their application; others told us they were willing to pay more
when they had urgent, high-volume needs. Because of the dynamic nature of
supply and demand in the Amazon EC2 environment, we developed Spot Instances to
let customers take advantage of our unused capacity while specifying a price
they are willing to pay."
"Spot Instances enable cost-efficient computing across the spectrum of
simulations run by our pharmaceutical and life sciences customers," said Chris
Dagdigian, founder and director of technology at Bioteam, in a statement. "We
can now run jobs that had previously been set aside as too expensive to
process. With Spot Instances, those jobs are coming off the shelf and further
contributing to the product development process."
Amazon officials said Spot Instances are particularly applicable to
applications that can have flexible start and stop times such as image and
video conversion and rendering, data processing, financial modeling and
analysis, Web crawling, and load testing. By being flexible on when their
instances run, coupled with the ability to bid what they are willing to pay for
capacity, customers can lower their Amazon EC2 costs, the company said.

In addition, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of
additional capacity for applications with urgent needs. When these needs
arise, users can specify a higher maximum bid, which will raise the priority of
a request for capacity, Amazon officials said.
Moreover, to use Spot Instances, customers place a Spot Instance request,
specifying the instance family, size and the region they desire as well as the
number of Spot Instances they want to run and the maximum price they are
willing to pay per instance, Amazon said. If a customer's maximum price exceeds
the current Spot Price, the customer's instances will run until they choose to
terminate the instances or their maximum bid falls below the Spot Price-whichever
is sooner. Like other Amazon EC2 instances, Spot Instances can be terminated
when they are no longer needed. If the Spot Price goes above a user's
maximum bid and the instance is terminated by Amazon EC2, the user will not be
charged for any partial hour of usage.
"Spot Instances and the Condor scheduler will enable a 'no compute
cycle left behind' policy for running scientific and financial calculations on
Amazon EC2," said Jason Stowe, CEO of
Cycle Computing, in a statement. "Our CycleCloud service provides
secure, elastic compute clusters on Amazon EC2, helping our customers,
including Eli Lilly, Varian Inc. and Pfizer, run molecular modeling,
next-generation sequencing and risk-analysis calculations. With Spot Instances,
CycleCloud can execute calculations when the price is right, resulting in real
cost management for our clients."
"Clarity Solutions provides advanced investment platforms and advisory
services to financial institutions," said Adam Kirby, CEO
of Clarity Solutions, also in a statement. "We're using on-demand instances to
provide our clients with deep insight into opportunities and risks in
structured finance and credit derivatives markets. We're excited about Spot
Instances because they enable our clients to lower costs on batch processing
and provide access to a pool of resources for time-critical workloads. We
see this as just another example of how AWS is pioneering the future of cloud
computing."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.